"I'm always fine," Mina tells him: an easy answer. Perhaps too easy. "Are you?"

He looks tired suddenly. The charming rogue gone, leaving him fretting, serious. She aches for him. For both of them, really, the recaptured ease of their long-abiding love for one another seemingly gone. The new connection of blood and fire standing in ash.

She won't turn her back on him now, after all this time, regardless of her own lack of understanding. The fear she has that perhaps she'd truly failed him as a wife. The complete uncertainty of just what does he want... Mina's not sure she has it in her to be his distant friend, aloof and untouchable like some maiden aunt.

She doesn't know what any of it means.

"We've both got a lot to digest, I suppose," she says.